About the Author

Camara Laye (1928-1980) was born in Kouroussa, a large village on
the river Niger in the French West African colony of Upper Guinea.
The Camaras are one of the oldest clans of the Malinke people, and
Camara Laye's father, a goldsmith, was a man of considerable local
authority. The eldest of seven children, Camara spent his formative
years in Koranic and French elementary schools before winning a
scholarship to study automobile engineering in Argenteuil, outside
Paris. His precocious first book, the autobiographical novel The
Dark Child, was published in France in 1953 to great acclaim; it
was followed a year later by his masterpiece, The Radiance of the
King. In the late 1950s Camara Laye returned to Africa, where he
worked in a variety of official capacities for the government of
newly independent Guinea, only to be driven into exile because of
his political outspokenness. Though his final years were
overshadowed by illness and poverty, Camara Laye completed two
additional major works: Dramouss, a continuation of The Dark Child,
and The Guardian of the Word, a rendering into French of the great
Malian epic Soundiata. Toni Morrison, Robert F. Goheen Professor at
Princeton, is the author of seven novels. She received the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 1993. (August 2001) James Kirkup (1918-2009)
was a prolific English poet, translator and travel writer.

Reviews

Laye's dreamlike, sinister, erotic setting is worthy of Kafka.
Sunday Telegraph Has been described as a journey towards native
African wisdom. It is perhaps better read as a cutting reworking of
European books about Africa and its 'mysteries', which are only
redeemed for civilisation through the European hero. Times Literary
Supplement

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